The present invention relates to a dispenser for a wide variety of types of tape sold in rolls, including several kinds of tape that are relatively difficult to hold and/or to dispense, for example, relatively thick woven fabric tape formed from synthetic material in fiber form such as polyamide, polyester and polyolefin polymers and the like such as Nylon, Dacron and Kevlar that carries no adhesive backing and therefor has a low coefficient of friction that renders the tape so slippery that the tape tends to unroll and slide out of the orderly coiled configuration in which a roll of tape is sold unless restrained against unrolling and uncoiling—a dispenser having portions that engage three surfaces of a coiled roll of tape to maintain the orderly configuration of the tape roll during dispensing—a dispenser that permits tape to be unrolled and dispensed as needed for continuous application or that permits desired lengths of tape to be severed from the roll as needed, and that permits a length of tape uncoiled from but not yet severed from the roll to be recoiled back onto the roll to be dispensed again, as tape is needed—a rolled tape dispenser that can be strap or belt supported alongside the thigh or hip of a worker for one-handed ease of use, or that can be held in one hand as the other hand is utilized to unroll and sever tape from a roll that has its orderly integrity maintained during dispensing.
Previously proposed rolled tape dispensers that were intended to be belt or strap supported so that a wearer could dispense either a continuous length of tape or a series of relatively short lengths of tape typically presented disadvantages resulting from complexity of design, high cost of component parts, inability to accommodate one-handed dispensing when strap or belt supported alongside the thigh or hip of a wearer, and operational characteristics that may change detrimentally as the diameter of a tape roll being dispensed diminishes. A prevalent and widely encountered drawback has been the failure of previously proposed dispensers to retain thick, slick surfaced, woven fabric tape in an orderly rolled form, often resulting in lengthy reaches of tape being trampled upon, being caught on ladders, scaffolding and the like, or wasted. Yet another commonly encountered drawback has been the lack of ease with which undamaged lengths of dispensed tape can be returned to the roll when more tape has been pulled from the roll than is needed at the moment.